This kind of coordination is awed by researchers, such as Bert Hoeksema, senior research scientist at Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, Netherlands. Once the polyps get a good grab on the tentacles, other polyps will provide help by getting the jellyfish’s large feeding arms to ensure it cannot swim away. The attack begins when an ‘innocent’ jellyfish swims close enough to the coral to get a grab on its tentacles. It is purely based on opportunities and teamwork. What’s amazing about the fact that corals can eat jellyfish, is that the stationary creature don’t need to set any trap or attract in a seductive way to get their preys close to them. “The jelly tried to move, to escape, but there was no way,” Badalamenti stated. The researchers then reported what they witnessed to Fabio Badalamenti, Research Director for the Italian National Research Council Institute for Coastal Marine Environment in Sicily. “I made a signal to Luigi immediately,” said Fernandez. Tomas Vega Fernandez and Luigi Musco, from Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn, witnessed how orange coral catch and consume mauve stingers, a kind of stinging jellyfish off Italian island of Pantelleria. Their tiny mouths will tear apart the prey, and then consume the parts they get from the work individually. What’s amazing about this teamwork, every individual polyps participating in the labor will share the catch. But for bigger preys, the teamwork mentioned above is a necessity. Starting from variety of small microscopic organisms such as zooplanktons, to bigger creatures such as small fish and stinging jellyfish.Ĭorals don’t need to work together to get zooplanktons, they can just eat any number of planktons floating near them by sucking in water. With those three weapons mentioned above, the species that corals can catch varies. This is when things get interesting, when a single polyp is trying to catch bigger prey, its neighbor will provide help to grab it, providing bigger grab power. When a polyp spots bigger prey, like jellyfish or fish, its opportunistic instinct tells the polyp to just catch the prey. But to get larger preys like fish and jellyfish, they need more than those two weapons, and this is when their third and the ultimate weapon comes.Ĭorals are actually a group of identical polyps living together. Marine creatures love corals, and that’s why they don’t hesitate swimming close to corals.īoth stinging cells and patience might be effective enough to grant them small marine creatures. Even though they cannot move, they don’t need to do the closure. However, their patience always pays off, most of their preys ‘underestimate’ the power of corals. Patience is an important thing to have for them because basically they cannot move. Yes, corals can sting their prey using similar stinging cells like what jellyfish own.īut that’s not the main weapon that corals use in hunting their food, instead they use patience and good teamwork more than just stinging the preys passing by. To prove that corals are actually predators, here we give you the list of weapons that they use: stinging cells, patience, and good teamwork. Here, in this article, we will show you that corals are more badass than you think. Some corals are known to habitually ‘consume’ bigger marine creatures, although such kind of feast is rarely witnessed by human eyes. The thing is, corals are actually ones of the most vicious and fiercest carnivores in the ocean. Thus, no wonder that some of them are carnivore, more than just some herbivore species that most of us are thinking about. Their appearance comes from calcium carbonate which is basically their hard skeleton. However, for small marine animals, the latter characteristics are more likely to be used to describe corals.Ĭorals are more than ‘ living rocks’, they are actually real animals. None of us will ever think about how vicious and fierce they are. When we talk about corals, what comes to our minds might be about its beauty.
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